Brandon Adcock dot com

As universal search becomes increasingly integrated with the different offerings of each search engine, top ranking real estate spots will only become more difficult to achieve. It was just a few years ago, that websites only competed with other websites for top rankings, that’s not the case anymore. Now that pictures, videos, news, and soon to be products (not to mention 1 spot guaranteed to Wikipedia) are included, companies and sites must make use of every type of medium they can to achieve rankings.

Eventually Google Product Search (formerly known as Froogle) will be a fully integrated part of the search results. Currently product search is accessible in ways pointed out by the screenshot below.

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The title of this article says it all. Most everyone knows the order of market share for search engines, even people who are not in the industry. We all know that in terms of search volume Google is 1, Yahoo is 2, and Microsoft is 3. According to my Microsoft rep, their market share is about 13.6%. I believe she said they use comScore data and that comScore rates them slightly lower than others.

This is what I was shown as accurate historical market share for Microsoft. I will say that from what I have heard from Microsoft, they are in online advertising for the long haul. They have many new things coming out and I am really intrigued by several of them. They should continue to see a rise in market share from current changes, but they have yet to integrate the cornerstone of their company, software. I mean Jesus (not literally), the possibilities are endless if they can integrate it properly.

If Live search can be correctly and cleanly integrated into Office, hell just Word alone, it would be a huge boost for them. Can you image the ability to select a portion of text in your word document, right click, and hit search. It would then interface directly into Live’s search results and provide results for the text you selected. That is just one option for implementation, even just a search box in the toolbar area would be a huge improvement for them. I wonder why something like this wasn’t included in the release of office 2007?

Now obviously, I have not taken into account legal ramifications of bundling search in with Microsoft’s products. I am not a legal expert, or really even that knowledgeable about monopoly laws, but I am sure Microsoft could find a way around them. It seems to me that the next large battlefield for search juggernauts will be search integration.

A colleague of mine passed me this study in an email today, I am surprised that I have not seen it before. Nonetheless, it is a very interesting find that anyone in the Search industry should read.

Cornell University did a study of 397 search queries to determine eye tracking patterns for Google results. They used undergraduates students to perform searches in areas related to movies, travel, music, politics, local, and trivia. The picture below is a representation of the results they found.

While this study only covers organic/natural results, not paid, and does not include anything past the first page, I don’t think it would be an outlandish assumption to say that these trends also hold true for those two areas as well. It is obvious from this heatmap image, how important rankings are and specifically being “above the fold”. I would be very interested to see Cornell repeat this study after a few years and see if there is a pattern change of how users look at search results. Maybe users would become accustomed to seeing “spammy” results at the top of the page for certain queries and start to naturally shift focus to lower results. Or, the results could be similar. Anyway, its food for thought.

Link to original study

This article is going to tell you how my company dropped their CPC for branded terms by 50%. Who wouldn’t want to do that? Keep reading.

Before I go on any further, let me clarify for anyone who might be slightly confused when I refer to branded terms, I am referring to search terms with some version of a company’s brand name in it. As a little background, I recently came on board at a Fortune 50 retailer to do SEM work for them. They have been having some internal discussion about whether or not they should be advertising on branded terms because upper management thinks it is cannibalizing organic results. Thats another article I will be posting, the findings from our experiment of Organic cannibalization from Paid Search. Anyway, we see a very high CTR, conversion rate, and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) for our branded terms, but our CPCs were in the high teens and it was costing a lot.

When thinking about the Paid Ad keywords, it can be thought of just like typical supply and demand. The more players bidding on a keyword the higher the CPCs will be. Because of this, branded terms tend to cost less than others. Have you ever thought you might be driving up your own ad cost? That is exactly what we found with my company. Our brand is very large and so is our paid advertising budget. We spend millions a year on paid search. There was a theory that since we were such a large player for purchasing our branded terms that we might be bidding up our own prices, so to speak. A test was done and our max CPC was reduced to what our average CPC cost was. After this was done, we saw a drop of several cents in CPC price. Then, after we lowered it to the average CPC, it was lowered roughly another 20%. All the while, watching to make sure none of our terms went inactive for search, thus indicating we had gone to low. After lowering it the second time, we had successfully cut our CPC by nearly 50% and were seeing single digit CPC.

To pull it all back together in case my train of thought was off, we realized that our brand power was quite large and that we could lower our branded CPC by simply lowering our bids. I thought the findings were pretty darn interesting. Not to mention the lower CPC allowed us to realize a higher ROAS.

Anyone else seen this before? Also as a disclaimer, I am not taking credit for these results, I actually started a few days after the theory was put in to effect. I just thought I would share our findings.